by Mike Booth
Time to Think About the End
Today nobody knows how much time we have left. According to my best estimate, the game is over. We’re just waiting for the clock to run out. In that brief meantime I must tell the story of America’s–and by extension the world’s– demise in the clearest, sparest, most urgent way possible. I have to go on record on the off chance that my account might turn up in the time capsule that the next occupants of earth find when they arrive.
The most recent developments in these end times have been worldwide, but were mainly perpetrated or inspired by the American government, both overtly and covertly. They began on a mass scale at the end of the Second World War when the United States found itself holding all the cards necessary to take over the world. So they did. That’s why this story is essentially about American predatory strategies, misdeeds, cynicism and opportunism, all topped off by a frosting of steely hypocrisy, expert lies and artful deception. With these ingredients you can imagine the cake.
This introduction sounds like a pitch from the televangelists of the Apocalypse. We have too many of those already. But my cause, though it sounds similar, is the opposite. My apocalypse is not based on scripture nor other mythical and magical premises. It`s not making any promises nor profits. The objective is not to offer you a back door to heaven; it’s just to try to explain what happened when a band of greed-and-power-driven amoral rich people and institutions got a death grip on the United States–and the world–strangling them mercilessly over seven or eight decades. I think I can explain how it occurred. I don’t want you to pass through the gates of hell, still wondering what happened.
The Beginning of the End
The underpinnings of the American empire were laid down in international agreements forged at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 with the predictable end of the Second World War in sight. There, in the bucolic setting of a New Hampshire ski resort, 730 delegates of all 44 countries allied in the fight against the Nazis, gathered allegedly to hammer out agreements, but in reality to rubber stamp the proposals put forth by the American committee led by Harry Dexter White, a brilliant economist with the US Treasury Department. Ironically, White, the maximum exponent of American neo-colonial capitalism, was later accused, though not convicted, of being a Russian spy.
Key agreements signed at Bretton Woods regulated post-war policy on international monetary and financial order, as well as the regulation of trade after the conclusion of World War II. Those agreements created the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, later part of the World Bank group) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), two powerful entities that established the US dollar as the international reserve currency. Bretton Woods policies, with later refinements and the burgeoning national security state, provided a solid footing for American domination world wide. Or almost world wide. There were a couple of notable exceptions, both of them, curiously, communists.
In 1976, Marcus Raskin, American social critic, activist, philosopher, and co-founder of the progressive think tank, the Institute of Policy Studies, summed up the situation in an article entitled : Democracy vs. the National Security State, published in the Duke University Law Journal, Law and Contemporary Problems:
“It is not possible to understand the national security state and reasons which give rise to the need for dismantling it without mentioning the profound and wrenching events of the last fifty years. The national security state emerges from war, from fear of revolution and change, from the economic instability of capitalism, and from nuclear weapons and military technology. It has been the actualizing mechanism of ruling elites to implement their imperial schemes and misplaced ideals.”
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/lcp/vol40/iss3/7/
Applied Democracy: Takeover for Everyone
There followed in orderly succession the creation in of the National Security Act of 1947, which established both the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which had been working clandestinely in Europe as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) since 1942. Its first commander was the colorful Colonel William (Wild Bill) Donovan, whose statue stands today in the lobby of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Then came NATO in 1952, a brilliant piece of strategy that permitted the Americans to surveil and supervise their sorely debilitated European allies as a group, while portraying the operation as a mutual defense pact against possible Russian military incursions. These theoretical incursions were highly unlikely, due to the battered condition of Russia after bearing the brunt of the allied victory in World War II. With all of these measures in place the United States definitively had the world frying pan by the handle.
The only igualitarian element in this ruthless series of takeovers was the fact that its exploitation tactics were applied similarly at home and abroad. It wasn’t only the families of Southeast Asia and the Middle East that were submitted to the treatment. It was also applied to the working families of Flint and Pittsburg, by means of tax breaks for the rich, anti-union legislation, the off-shoring of everything, and the derogation of regulations on toxic big business, though admittedly without the cluster bombs and white phosphorous.
Mike Lofgren Will Make You Laugh and Cry
The most readable, and amusing, account of the process of American degeneration at the hands of the Republican Party was written by a Washington, lifetime insider, Mike Lofgren, who worked as a Republican Party operative for 28 years, until he could no longer stand it. Then he became Washington’s most knowledgeable whistle blower and told all in the brilliant 2012 book, The Party is Over, How Republicans Went CRAZY, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted. This sounds like the title of a skit from Saturday Night Live, but it’s a well-documented account of Republican Party malefeasance in the years that included the presidencies of Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama. “I wrote the book,” Lofgren said in one of his presentations in 2012, “because I am a concerned citizen.” His second book, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government, was published in 2016.
If you don’t already know Lucian Truscott, you might enjoy meeting him via his Newsletter. He put his finger in America’s mortal racism wound the other day:
If you wait long enough, they finally get around to telling you who they really are and what they really want. Today, the Tennessee House of Representatives passed a bill that will ban the teaching of critical race theory in Tennessee schools. The bill is similar to those Republicans are attempting to pass in many states where they control the governorship and legislature. Before it left office, the Trump administration promoted the banning of teaching so-called “divisive concepts” such as the 1619 Project and critical race theory to public school students. Among those concepts are the idea that the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist, and that slavery had a role in the founding of the country.
Lucian Truscott Newsletter
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This is the first installment of a six-part essay that will be posted weekly.
Trump and All the Rest 